Let me finish tonight with this.
Mitt Romney is running for president using the words and speeches of the same people who got us into the hell of Iraq: the neocons.
You can hear them in Romney’s speech today, all this talk of “not apologizing for America’s power.” They’ve got a thing about that phrase: we should never apologize for our power.
Well, of course, it’s all a straw man. No one apologizes for America’s power. Yes, we rethink some of our actions — like not getting into World War II sooner, like escalating the American war in Vietnam, like the deceit and cunning and propaganda that took us into Iraq nine years ago. Yes, we dare to rethink and learn from our experiences. Yes, we wonder if the military solution was the right one. We, many of us, believe that mistakes were made, that leaders told us untruths, that we were sold a reality that was not a reality.
Yes, all this is true. In the world outside of stupid politics, it’s called “growing up.”
I don’t know how someone like Mitt Romney, who didn’t serve in Vietnam, doesn’t feel in his conscience the need to revisit that war, to figure out what he thinks was done right, what was done wrong. That’s not “apologizing” for America’s power; it’s understanding when and where and how to use it.
Here’s what I think: I think that the horror of war is so vital to realize, to take to our own minds and hearts, that we don’t send men and women into battle until the leaders fully and fairly decide that is the only solution. I trust President Obama to make that kind of decision. Today’s words by Mitt Romney do not give me that confidence. The fact that they were so transparently written by the same neocons who sold us the war in Iraq makes me all the less certain of him. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. Any American who bought the lies and corrupt thinking that took us into Iraq must hear in Romney’s words today the worst memories of Iraq and “WMD” and “aluminum tubes” and “Niger yellowcake” and Scooter Libby and all the rest of this terrible, dishonest history. If anyone should apologize to America, it’s the neocons who wrote Romney’s speech.
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